Social dominance theory was developed to account for why societies producing surplus take and maintain the form of group-based dominance hierarchies, in which at least one socially-constructed group has more power than another, and in which men are more powerful than women and adults more powerful than children. Although the theory has always allowed for societies to differ in their severity of...

Studies of animal behavior consistently demonstrate that the social environment impacts cooperation, yet the effect of social dynamics has been largely excluded from studies of human cooperation. Here, we introduce a novel approach inspired by nonhuman primate research to address how social hierarchies impact human cooperation. Participants competed to earn hierarchy positions and then could co...

Socioecology considers that the features of food sources affect female social relationships in groupliving species. Among primates, the tests of socioecological models are largely focused on Old World species and do not evaluate if the use of feeding tools affects the competitive regime over food and females’ relations in wild populations. We studied female social relationships among a wild pop...

Dominance hierarchies occur in numerous social species, and rank within them can greatly influence the quality of life of an animal. In this review, I consider how rank can also influence physiology and health. I first consider whether it is high- or low-ranking animals that are most stressed in a dominance hierarchy; this turns out to vary as a function of the social organization in different ...

An important aspect of community analysis is not only determining the communities within the network, but also sub-communities and hierarchies. We present an approach for finding hierarchies in social networks that uses work from random matrix theory to estimate the number of clusters. The method analyzes the spectral fingerprint of the network to determine the level of hierarchy in the network...

Social status is a key regulator of health and reproduction in mammals, including humans. Despite this, relatively little is known about how social status influences the mammalian brain. Furthermore, the extent to which status is an independent construct, i.e., not simply acting as a psychosocial stressor, is yet to be determined. Research to date reveals several promising mechanisms and/or sys...

Language evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that having isolated agent groups rather than an interconnected agent is more advantageous for the emergence of a social communication system. Distinctive groups t...

Negotiation is a process that ranges from international issues to common society interactions. We present approaches to facilitate the process by exploring alternative spaces for this process. We base the approach on exploring alternative terminology that can resolve conflicts in the negotiation solution. Concept hierarchies can provide higher level concepts that can be used to obtain agreement...